This WordPress.com site is for thoughts from "the other side"

Beautiful Fantasy: Spartan Justice for All

I’m reblogging this because it’s a great close to that rather silly back-and-forth commenting between Phil Huston and myself. I know better than to engage that way, but Phil’s ways are truly very seductive. Still friends, Phil?

Where do I begin? Did I love the movie “300”? Yes. Was it based in reality? Somewhat. Here and there. Just put a little Wite-out on the ugly parts and blow up the good parts by 1,000.

Well, it’s kinda like how, over time, certain people and/or events become…let’s say…changed from what actually happened or who they actually were, and all of this becomes viewed, in time, through a distorted lens that’s only telling part of the story. Yeah, yeah, history is written by the victors. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Examples? No problem. Two that stand out in my mind are the Rhodes Scholarship and Margaret Sanger. When one thinks of a Rhodes Scholar and the associated scholarship, one generally conjures up benign brainiacs, geeks and nerds of Mensa or Jeopardy! qualifications, whose brains are bigger, synapses fire faster, or maybe are simply gifted in the retention of trivia and facts.

True, and it is even true with the “good” ones. Let’s be clear that MLK was no courageous saint; he had problems, and he had to have his manhood challenged by his peers (other Black pastors) to go down and see about getting Rosa Parks released from jail. He was also less than a faithful husband, or so the evidence suggests. Abraham Lincoln was no sweetheart either. He thought educated Black men like Fredrick Douglass should be allowed to vote, but in the beginning he was against all Black men being allowed to vote. His decision to back the vote, so to speak, was forced, to say the least. It’s important when we think of historical figures (or contemporary figures) to think of them all as complicated human beings, who were neither total angels or total demons, neither or which is human. “History” is almost always a blooming lie.

Via details, certainly history comes out in lie after lie but we can trust the greater movements that historians cannot hide, example, the bad collective choices that lead to the fall of the greatest empires. We should not be either shocked or defensive when our turn comes to live through one of these collapses. But as they say, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.